What to Do When Your Old Content Turns Stale?

Content marketing is at the heart of SEO. By consistently publishing good quality content, you can drive organic traffic to your site, boost your rankings and generate quality leads. However, even the best of content can become outdated at some point. When some of your best content pieces become stale, they can cause more harm than good. 

Suppose your business has been regularly blogging and posting content consistently for some time. In that case, you may have old content (including some of your best performing posts) that may have become outdated, redundant or irrelevant. 

So what do you do when some of your old content pieces begin to show signs of becoming irrelevant. Here are some ideas. 

Do a Content Audit 

Begin by taking an inventory of all the content you have published (blog posts, guest posts, white papers, email newsletters, etc.) Now review each piece of content for relevancy and usefulness whilst noting how outdated each article is. 

Now, identify the content that’s bringing the most traffic to your site, driving the most engagement and conversions. 

Group Your Content

Once you have assessed your content, group them into different categories based on the action to be taken:

• No changes needed
• Minor edits – Start by editing posts that need minor edits. Any old content that still has some use can be refreshed with some minor edits and changes. Perhaps the statistics need an update? Or a couple of sentences need to be tweaked for relevancy? Take care of those to refresh your content.
• Significant changes – Some posts may have value but will need considerable editing to keep them relevant and valuable. These may take more time, but it may be worth your while, especially if these are some of your best-performing pages.
• No longer useful – Any content that has become obsolete or outdated (such as top ten things do in 2010) would be best to retire them for good.

Plan Your Calendar and Take Action 

Once you have assessed the content, it’s time to work them into your editorial calendar. Because creating a new piece of content takes considerably more time than editing existing ones, adding them to your content calendar won’t be as taxing.

Proactively audit your content and look for ways to keep your content fresh, useful and evergreen at all times. This way, you won’t end up with a considerable list to edit in one go.